3/21/2001 Gendered Media
Reflection hypothesis - holds that media content mirrors the behaviors and relationships, and values and norms most prevalent in a society. However we can also view media as prescriptions that tell you how to live your life and therefore, media is also a powerful shaper of behaviors and values.
Symbolic Annihilation - the media traditionally have ignored, trivialized, or condemned women.
3 ideas -
Women and minorities are under represented in both decision-making positions and as subjects of media.
Women and men are more often portrayed in stereotypical fashion in the media.
The relationships between women and men are also presented in a stereotypical manner.
Underrepresentation of Women and Minorities -
Newspapers - News of women-centered activities and events, or of particular women (with the exception of female heads of state, women who have died or been killed and women notable for their association with famous men) is usually reported as soft news and relegated to a secondary "non-news" section of the paper. For instance, a 1996 study of twenty U.S. newspapers found that 15% of front-page news references were of females and only 33% of front-page photos included women.
Analyses of the covers of the 3 largest news magazines (time, Newseek and U.S.News and World Report) in 1995 - 72 men made the cover of these magzines with just 3 women- model Claudia Schiffer, murder Susan Smith and Princess Diana.
Perhaps more telling is the way news about women is treated when it is reported as hard news. Reporters were likely to mean an individual's sex, appearance, and marital status or parenthood. Example 1996 Carol Mosley-Braun was described as "" den mother with a cheerleader'' smile."" Last year's report of New York woman described as a "feisty grandmother.' (who is also a lawyer). Mrs. Clinton vs. Rick Lazio.
In attempting to explain the symbolic annihilation of women by newspapers, many analysts have emphasized that most of the staff at the nation's 1,5000 daily newspapers are men. (37% are women, 31% female newsroom supervisors, 19.4% female executive editors, 8% publishers).
Gender and Magazines -
Covert advertising in articles - ads are placed next to an article that deals with the product. For example, actor discusses how she stays so young - in the article she says, "I use product X." Following the article on the actor, there is an advertisement for product X. This is called complementary copy.
Television - Women play 1 out of every 3 roles on prime-time television. (has not changed since 1954)
Children's programming - males outnumber females by two to one
Newscasts - Women make up about 16% of newscasters
This constant distortion tempts us to believe that there really are more men than women and, further, that men are the cultural standard. These facts certainly doesn't support the reflection hypothesis.
Minorities are even less visible than women. Also underrepresented is the single fastest growing group of Americans - older people. As a country, we are aging so that people over 60 make up a major part of our populations; within this group, women significantly outnumber men. Older people not only are underrepresented in media but also are represented inaccurately: sick, dependent, fumbling, and passive. - often presented as victims.
Stereotypical Portrayals of Women and Men
Stereotypes of Men - Media reinforce long-standing cultural ideals of masculinity: Men are presented as hard, tough, independent, sexually aggressive, unafraid, violent, totally in control of all emotions and - above all - in no way feminine.
children's television - typically shows males as "aggressive, dominant and engaged in exciting activities from which they receive rewards from others for their 'masculine' accomplishments." Usually the majority of the characters as well as the main character.
Equally interesting is how males are not presented. Specifically, there are seldom portrayed as nurturers - not involved in their families - seldom shown doing housework. Typically, represented as uninterested in and incompetent at homemaking, cooking and child care. (1 to 3% male characters as compared to 20 to 27 percent of female characters).
Men's Magazines - magazines like Esquire and Gentleman's Quarterly - still emphasize living a leisurely lifestyle that is made possible by one's financial success.
Similar to women's magazines, periodicals intended for men generate their own gender images and ideals. Normative masculinity according to these magazines does not include establishing a long-term relationship with a woman. Instead the real man is free and adventurous. He is a risk taker who purses his work and his hobbies - including in this latter category relationships with women - with vigor.
Stereotypes of Women -
In TV, women are portrayed as significantly younger and thinner than women in the population as a whole - being younger and less mature than male characters and therefore, less authoritative. 1994 - only 15% of female characters on prime-time TV were aged 45 or older. , and most are depicted as passive, dependent on men, and enmeshed in relationships or housework.
46% of women on television compared with just 16% of men are thin or very thin.
Female newscasters are expected to by younger, more physically attractive, and less outspoken than males.
28% are shown on the job compared with 41% of male characters
MTV - routinely pictures women satisfying men's sexual fantasies. Media reiterate the cultural image of women as dependent, ornamental objects whose primary functions are to look good, please men, and stay quietly on the periphery of life. Think DreamWorlds II.
Women who depart from traditional roles are portrayed positively, but this done either by making their career lives invisible or softening and feminizing working women. Example, women physicians on ER professionally competent, BUT also very attractive.
Magazines -Popular women's magazines are another source of stereotypical portrayals. Women's magazines continue to emphasize how to look better, appeal to men, cook nice meals, maintain relationships and care for families. - Fashion, fitness, cosmetics, weight and age control. Some magazines such as Cosmopolitan are focusing on a bolder sexual behavior. The ultimate goal remains getting and keeping a man, even if the strategy is no longer romance, but rather aggressive sex appeal.
Magazines play a key role in promoting pleasing others as a primary focus of women's lives. Peirce's (1990) study found that magazines aimed at women stress looking good and doing things to please others. Thus, advertising tells women how to be "me, only better" by dyeing their hair to look younger; how to lose weight so "you'll still be attractive to him", and how to prepare gourmet meals so "he's always glad to come home."' Constantly, these advertisements emphasize pleasing others, especially men, as central to being a woman, and the message is fortified with the thinly veiled warning that if a woman fails to look good and please, her man might leave.
Advertising also sells products and reinforces attitudes in ways that often go unrecognized by the causal reader. Goffman's early work 1979 concentrated on the subtleties of posture and relative size and positioning of hands, eyes, knees and other parts of the body in ads.
A man is pictured taller than a woman unless he is socially inferior to her. Men and boys are shown instructing women and girls. A woman's eye is averted to the man in the picture with her, but a man's eye is averted only to a superior. Women's hands caress or barely touch. They are rarely shown grasping, manipulating, or creatively shaping. Women have faraway looks in their eyes, especially in the presence of men. Women act like children and are often depicted with children.
More recent data indicate that women continue to be depicted in terms of Goffman's categories. We see this in the MTV women - often they are just body parts - not full women. Archer found that "face-ism" still dominate for men as does "body-ism" for women. They suggest that the face is associated with qualities such as character and intellect while the body is associated with qualities such as weight and emotion, thus contributing to our beliefs about what is deemed important for men and women
Stereotypical Images of Relationships between Men and Women -
Women's dependence/men's independence
Example - MTV - portrays females as passive and waiting for men's attention, while males are shown ignoring, exploiting or directing women.
Commercials, too manifest power cues that echo the male dominance/female subservience pattern. For instance, men are usually shown positioned above women, and women are more frequently pictured in varying degrees of undress - nonverbal cues that represent women as vulnerable and more submissive while men stay in control.
Men's authority/women's incompetence
Men are the competent authorities who save women from their incompetence.
Commercials -define males as authorities. Women are routinely shown anguishing over dirty floors and bathroom fixtures only to be relieved of their distress when Mr. Clean shows up to tell them how to keep their homes spotless.
75% of the voice-overs are male. Using male voice-overs reinforces the cultural view that men are authorities and women depend on men to tell them what to do. This discussion is taking place in what gender computer-generated voices should be male or female. The rationale of the advertising industry is that female voices are neither authoritative nor believable. But marketing research casts some doubt on this argument. Studies show no differences in the persuasiveness of female and male voice-overs and researchers have also found that female spokespersons are more trusted by the public than male spokespersons.
Women as primary caregivers/men as breadwinners
Men are portrayed as incompetent about nutrition, childcare, and housework.
Women as victims and sex objects/men as aggressors.
A final theme in mediate representations of relationships between women and men is the view of women as subject to men's sexual desires. The irony of this representation is the very qualities women are encouraged to develop (beauty, sexiness, passivity, and powerlessness) in order to meet cultural ideals of femininity contribute to their victimization. Also, the qualities that men are urged to exemplify (aggressiveness, dominance, sexuality, and strength) are identical to those linked to abuse of women.
Women are often portrayed alternatively either as decorative objects, who must attract a man to be valuable, or as victims of men's sexual impulses. Either way, women are defined by their bodies and how men treat them.
Portrayals of women as sex objects in advertising and particularly in MTV - Typically, females are shown dancing provocatively in scant and/or revealing clothing as they try to gain men's attention. Frequently, men are seen coercing women into sexual activities and/or physically abusing them. Violence against women is also condoned in many recent films. Male dominance and sexual exploitation of women are themes in virtually all R- and X-rated films. These media images carry to extremes long-standing cultural views of masculinity as aggressive and femininity as passive. They also make violence seem sexy.
Media's role in shaping our understanding of issues related to gender.
Who has the power? Who controls the media?
Historically, the lack of women in the media has been paralleled by the scarcity of women in charge of media. Only about 5% of television writers, executives, and producers are women. Ironically, while two-thirds of journalism graduates are women, they make up less than 5% of those in corporate management of newspapers and only about 5% of newspaper publishers. Female film directors are even more scarce, as are executives in charge of MTV.
Implications of Media Representations of Gender -
Fostering Unrealistic and Limited Gender Ideals -
Many of the images dispensed by media are unrealistic.
But do idealized images in media really affect us? Research, however, suggests that the unrealistic ideals in popular media do influence how we feel about ourselves and our relationships. Mediated images seem to function at a less than conscious level as implicit models for our own lives.
Role Modeling contributes to development of gender identity. We look to others - including mediated others- to define how we are supposed to be. Especially during the early years when children often do not clearly distinguish reality from fantasy, they seem susceptible to confusing media characters with real people.
Kimball's study compared the sex-stereotypical attitudes of children who lived in areas without television and those in similar areas who watched television. He found that children who watched television had more stereotyped views of the sexes.
Plausibility is related to viewing frequency. Some have argued that an observed relationship between television viewing and gender stereotyping does not necessarily mean that the television viewing causes the stereotyping. It maybe that those who tend to stereotyped also tend to watch more television. There is research that shows that children tend to choose programs that conform to gender stereotypes they have already learned. In other words, the media reinforce gender stereotypes that children are taught both by their parents and in school because children will select those media presentations that conform to what they have previously learned.
A study by J. Shapiro and L. Kroeger (1991) suggests that mediated myths of relationships contribute to socializing people into unrealistic views of what a normal relationship is. In particular, they found that MTV's and rock music's emphasis on eroticism and sublime sex is linked to an expectation of sexual perfectionism in real relationships.
Pathologizing the Human Body -
One of the most damaging consequences of media's images of women and men is that these images encourage us to perceive normal bodies and normal physical functions as problems. These images contribute to feelings of inadequacy, anorexia, body image problems, and cosmetic surgery.
In a study of 75 women students at Stanford University, the women reported they felt worse about their appearance after reading women's magazines.
Advertising is very effective in convincing us that we need products to solve problems we are unaware of until some clever pubic relations campaign persuades us that something natural about us is really unnatural and unacceptable - examples, gray hair, body hair, wrinkles, menopause. Many women's natural breast size exceeded the cultural ideal in the 1960s when thin, angular bodies were represented as ideal. Thus, breast reduction surgeries rose. By the 1980s, cultural standards changed to define large breasts as the feminine ideal. Consequently, breast augmentation surgeries accelerated.
These images are tied to larger social issues. For example, Greene and Dalton (1953) observed that the term premenstrual tension was coined and fit neatly with the effort to discredit women as inferior employees when they were no longer needed in the work force after WWII and the Korean War.
Normalizing Violence against Women
Is watching violence related to engaging in violence? Children learn to perceive violence as part of normal social life. The relationship between media violence and actual violence is one of the most studied aspects of media. When we continuously see aggression, physical assault, murder, rape, and other forms of violence depicted in media, it is small wonder that we become desensitized to violence. 3 theories of the connection between media violence and actual behavior: role modeling effect (watching violence makes one violent), cathartic effect (watching violence gets it out of your system), and catalytic effect (it does not cause violence but provides the catalyst for a personality prone to violence).
Roland (1993) reports male viewers are more likely than female viewers to see forced sex depicted in music videos as justified if mutual sexual attraction between the male and female performers was implied.
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